The H-2A visa program is an example of how legal immigration can supply labor in America, but farmers say reform is needed.
Joe Mencer, owner of Mencer Farms in Lake Village, Ark., on April 29, 2025. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
LAKE VILLAGE, Ark. – On a breezy day, sun and shadow dance across Mencer farms, turning it into a patchwork of green in the fertile Arkansas Delta.
It is humid here in the deep South, where the clock seems to run slower and the temperature hotter than in other places.
Lake Village is a small town sitting along Lake Chicot, an abandoned channel of the Mississippi River. Over thousands of years, flooding deposited rich alluvial soil, making it ideal for crops such as rice, cotton, soybeans, and corn.
As a child, William Mencer’s grandfather handed him a cowboy hat and a garden hoe to dig up the pigweeds growing between the crop rows.
The 31-year-old farmer remembers spending long, sweltering days alongside the farmworkers, his hands growing rough and calloused with the effort.
“So I learned, you know, what it was like for these workers.”
He vowed to escape the sweat and toil of the fields by going to law school and working in an office. But the family farm drew him back like a love song.
Now he is partnering with his father, Joe Mencer, to keep the farm afloat with temporary agriculture workers through the H-2A visa program. Continue reading
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